Archive for December, 2006

I hadn’t realized it’s been so long since I’ve posted. Life has been busy, the Christmas season is finally over, and the New Year is nearly upon us.

I recently decided that it was a mistake trying to learn Italian, before I had mastered Spanish. I was having a lot of trouble remembering Italian vocabulary without constantly comparing to Spanish, and the Spanish would continually pop into my head before the Italian would. It’s been about 10 years since I’ve studied my Spanish in any depth, and it has fallen into disuse. I had thought it would be smarter to gear away from the Spanish because of how much I did not remember, but I realized awhile ago that this is not really the case.

So I have decided to go back to my Spanish, to review and improve that before I move onto any other languages. That being said, I also do not want to get bored with it (and I know I will), so I have decided on Japanese as a secondary language. I spent alot of time debating between Chinese and Japanese, but I think Japanese is more doable at this point. Perhaps choosing to spread myself between two languages is a mistake, but I think it will help fill those points where you don’t feel like you’re advancing in the language you are focusing on.

I don’t like making specific goals, since I have no idea how much time I will have to devote to my language learning, nor how quickly I will progress with what time I do have. So to make it simple:

1. Spanish: My goal will be to learn 15 new words per day. That should give me a (new) vocabulary of about 5500 words at the end of the year. I will continue to listen to radio, podcasts, watch movies, and work through grammar and reading books, but those are things that are much harder to quantify. I’d like to be back to intermediate/advanced speaking proficiency by the end of 2007.

2. Japanese: My reading/writing goal will be to learn the 2 kana syllabaries, and begin learning the kanji, well enough to read through some basic Japanese texts. Three words per day for vocabulary, and working through grammar as time permits.

3. Other: I’ve kind of become fascinated with Lithuanian, and have a few books (with audio) on it. I also feel that I could learn a fair amount of another language or two (I’m thinking Russian and German, two languages completely different from the others I am focusing on) over time, if I commit myself to learning 3 words a day in each of them.

I think the important thing, dealing with the “other” languages, that if I decide to do that, I’m ONLY learning vocabulary. The only reason I would do this would be so that when I decide to focus on these languages, I will already have amassed a decent amount of vocabulary and it will (hopefully) be quite a bit easier to get further faster.

It seems like alot of words, all in all, but if I decide it’s too much, I may decide to forgo the German and Russian. With Spanish, that is my primary learning objective, to gain vocabulary. so I don’t think it’s really that big of a task. We shall see.